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Pirate Party Gaining Strength In Germany
bs0d3 writes "For the third consecutive regional election, The German Pirate Party has breached the five-percent mark needed to enter the state parliament, winning 8.2 percent of the vote in state of Schleswig-Holstein. From the article: 'The big winners on the night were the Pirates, an upstart party that has shaken up the staid world of German politics with a campaign based on more transparency in the political process and internet freedom.'"
Ten minutes and Google would have given you all the info you needed.
http://www.piratenpartei.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/parteiprogramm-englisch.pdf
They don't seem to have an overt foreign policy platform; but I'm going to take the wild guess that they aren't particularly hawkish.
From what I understood, the German PP tries to advocate the original direct democracy over the current representative democracy by utilizing social networking as a forum for collecting votes on each issue within the party. The problem with system itself originally was scaling, it simply didn't scale well beyond small city-state sized community and only now do we have realistic technological means to try to make it actually work on larger scale.
There are some issues with this approach, but it's certainly far more democratic then various representative democratic systems we currently have in the West.
http://wiki.piratenpartei.de/wiki/images/0/03/Parteiprogramm-englisch.pdf
This is the manifesto in english. The changes to this manifesto need 2/3 of votes on a party conference.
The statues are not available in english, so I'll post the translated German version:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&twu=1&q=piratenpartei+grundsatzprogramm?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A//wiki.piratenpartei.de/Bundessatzung%0A
As for the rest (positions, election program) please try to find it yourself or ask.
yesterday? elections
The 16 federal states of germany have their elections on different dates in a 5 year cycle. The next one is next sunday in Nordrhein-Westfalen. The PP won seats in all of the last 3 elections and is prognosed to do the same next sunday. The next federal election is fall next year but that is to far ahaed to give any credible prognosis for this small, new, sometimes chaotic party.